Editorials
Love Bites: Revisiting Nicolas Cage’s First Brush With Horror in ‘Vampire’s Kiss’
Nicolas Cage is in the midst of a sort of horror renaissance. Not that the prolific actor ever strayed far from any particular genre, churning out multiple films a year that run the gamut, but it’s in horror that he’s received praise and reappraisal thanks to films like Mandy and Color Out of Space. With recent announcements of Wally’s Wonderland, where he’ll take on demonic animatronics, his work in horror doesn’t appear to be slowing down. For all of the grandeur performances the actor has delivered in his career, his turn as Peter Loew in Vampire’s Kiss doesn’t get near as much consideration as it should. If you were to meet somewhere at the intersection of American Psycho and Martin, you’d likely find this cult gem.
Cage’s Peter Loew is a New York City literary agent. Like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, Loew is the epitome of ‘80s yuppie narcissism and greed, one that treats sexual partners like disposable playthings. He works all day and picks up lovers at the club by night, but spends a few hours on the weekend scaring his psychiatrist with terrifying confessions of his mental state. Like how a bat that found its way into his apartment turned him on, not the attractive woman he’d brought home.
When Loew meets Rachel (Jennifer Beals), their tryst turns into something more bizarre when she reveals her vampire fangs and bites him. It sparks a downward spiral for Loew, who believes himself to be becoming a vampire. He wears sunglasses to avoid the sun. He can’t see himself in the mirror. He hallucinates. He even buys novelty vampire fangs to compensate for his lack of developed teeth. Then there’s Rachel, his vampire master that seduces and taunts him throughout the story. Loew was an eccentric before his tryst with her, but after he’s become a madman. It’s his poor assistant Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso) that suffers for it the most.
Vampire’s Kiss, thanks to Cage’s eccentric performance, has provided a significant source of memes, but the truth is that it’s his performance that makes the film work. The actor has compared his acting style to that of old Hollywood troubadours with larger-than-life presentations. Cage certainly has delivered grandeur characters over his robust career, but according to the actor on the DVD’s commentary track, Peter Loew marks one of his favorite roles of all time. Vampire’s Kiss is a character study; its narrative unfurls slowly to unfold a slow deterioration of a man so empty and lonely he’s driven to vampire obsessed madness. The story demands a magnetic lead.
Just coming off his success with Moonlight, Cage’s reps begged him not to take the role of Loew. He bowed out, the part was given to Judd Nelson, and then Cage changed his mind. He couldn’t shake the character and asked to come back. Fortuitous events lined up, and thus Cage was reinstated for the part.
As for lines, Cage never deterred from Joseph Minion’s script. What he did do, though, was bring an eccentric physicality to the character. The dance club scene in the third act that sees him on the prowl for prey? His strange movements are directly inspired by Count Orlok in Nosferatu and German expressionist horror. The weird, yuppie voice for the character? He was aiming for a distinct, continental sound that he felt was befitting of this NYC literary agent character, much to the worry of producers.
The only real ad-lib or off-script moment Cage brought to the character was the infamous eating of the cockroach. The script called for Loew to suck on a raw egg, but Cage felt eating the bug would add shock value. Cage really did eat cockroaches for the scene. Director Bierman wanted a second take; therefore, a second bug getting chomped. I have a hunch this is one scene that doesn’t feature much acting.
Though Bierman and Cage knew precisely the type of film they were making, a profoundly dark psychological comedy, the distributor didn’t get it. Scenes were trimmed, marketing was weak, and Vampire’s Kiss flopped hard upon its theatrical release. Cage was well on his way to stardom, so the film didn’t hurt his career. Over the years, it did amass a cult following, and Cage’s over-the-top performance alone provided an endless source for entertainment.
Peter Loew deserves to be in the same conversation with Patrick Bateman. Both narcissistic NYC yuppies with eccentric behaviors and distinct ways of speaking, and both mentally deteriorating to the point of homicide- imagined and real. Both characters feature tremendously committed performances behind them, too, though Cage takes risks to an extreme – much to our enjoyment.
Loew is a character that’s unlikable from the start. We’re not meant to like him, but it’s Cage’s unique choices that provide access to the character. Loew is an awful person, especially for his cruelty of Alva. Still, the physicality and strangeness of Cage’s performance make it easier to wrap our heads around the character’s unhinged mental state. Cage’s current horror slate offers up fantastic roles garnering praise, but Vampire’s Kiss shows that always should’ve been the case.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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